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This ^. If the shots are truly protective, I don't understand what the hubbub is all about. Is it really all about protecting those who truly can't get the sho

This ^. If the shots are truly protective, I don't understand what the hubbub is all about. Is it really all about protecting those who truly can't get the shot for whatever reason? I doubt it.

Ensorceled 5y ago
The shots are NOT truly protective. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has an effectiveness of about 91%. That means in about 9% of cases it is not protective. I'm amazed we are this deep into this pandemic and people still have black and white thinking wrt to vaccinces.
- imgabe 5y ago
  I think most people consider 91% to be “truly” protective. Nothing is 100%. The vaccine is more than effective enough to reduce the risk of Covid to the general background risk level of life in general (things like car accidents, slipping in the shower, eating red meat, contracting a flesh eating amoeba from swimming in a lake etc.)
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    Car crashes kill 30K people a year in the US. COVID has killed 400K in the US in 2021. It's literally 10x worse than cars and 30K from cars is horrific.
    - imgabe 5y ago
      How many vaccinated people have been killed by Covid? I’m talking about the risk after you’re vaccinated.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  91% is truly protective, as long as that effectiveness lasts long enough to be meaningful. In fact, 91% is an amazingly high number - I don't know if any pre-mRNA vaccine has ever reached that level of effectiveness. So I return to my original point -- if they're really that effective, why the hubbub?
  - forgotmyoldname 5y ago
    Not to be condescending, but because people have been saying for a year now or more now that the virus will rapidly evolve and any vaccines will become less effective over time because of it. And the virus rapidly evolved and the vaccines we have became less effective to new strains, as expected. A quick deployment of vaccines would greatly reduce that risk (see: Japan currently having infections in the double digits following a rapid deployment in vaccines and universal masks, leaving little room for new strains to adapt). The pandemic has been a long chain of some insightful people saying "This bad thing will happen if people don't take X precaution." People say that's a lie--then don't take X precautions. Bad thing happens. People get angry and say they were lied to because bad thing happened when they were told it wouldn't happen (because loads of people took no precautions). Then there's a warning about another bad thing happening, followed by denial.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    It's quite clear that the person who wrote the comment I'm replying to believes that "truly protective" means 100% protection, and that if the vaccine was "truly protective" you no longer need to worry about getting COVID. This is a very dangerous idea and why there is so much confusion and misinformation. By insisting that 91% is "truly effective" in conversations like this you are not helping.
imgabe 5y ago
And if you can still transmit the disease even after getting the shot, then it doesn't protect those people anyway. They will still have to exercise whatever caution is necessary to protect themselves, which they would have to do anyway, because there are other diseases as well.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  Yeah, it's a partial measure that carries no guarantees... which makes it a poor candidate for a fix to roll out to everyone, in my opinion. It doesn't make sense to me why officials aren't focusing just on getting as close to 100% as possible of the vulnerable vaccinated. It's well known that surviving covid is a much better protection, and thus contributes more to herd immunity, than the mRNA shot+boosters. Perhaps "following the money" can provide answers? A vaccine mandate is a great way of making a lot of money for some people...
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    > it's well known that surviving covid is a much better protection, Getting sick sucks though. Especially when people get "long covid" that doesn't ever go away. > Perhaps "following the money" can provide answers? Perhaps the answer is not a secret conspiracy but a rational, human desire to protect people.
    - TimTheTinker 5y ago
      > Getting sick sucks though. Yeah, but that's really up to me, isn't it? There's a reason I choose not to live in China, Laos, or Vietnam. Now that the vaccine is so widely available: (a) health officials should drop all orders and regulations, and (b) hospitals ought to say "look, here's our COVID capacity; if we're full we can't serve you, sorry" -- with that capacity set at a reasonable, sustainable number for them. ... unless the shot isn't what they say it is in terms of effectiveness or safety. But if it is really that effective and safe, I don't see any reason not to implement (a) and (b). > Perhaps the answer is not a secret conspiracy but a rational, human desire to protect people. That's not what I see when people's basic human rights and freedoms are being removed. People in Australia are being kept in freakin' internment camps. When a 91+% effectiveness shot is available for free to everyone, the bar of rationally protecting people has been more than cleared. This doesn't appear to be about that anymore.
jhanschoo 5y ago
If you catch the flu once your immune system remembers it and can easily deal with exposure much better, but this memory fades in time. Your immune system isn't perfect either, and there are breakthrough cases, and this is more frequent in the elderly, albeit frequently milder. The vaccine offers protection similar to catching the flu (albeit much better in the case of the mRNA and J&J ones (<10% infected compared to ~50% infected in traditional technology) but protection is not guaranteed. I'm disappointed I'm explaining this, I thought it's common knowledge that vaccines offer great protection but not invulnerability.
- imgabe 5y ago
  I know all that. I can fully accept that the vaccine doesn’t make me invulnerable. I have the vaccine and am fully prepared to go back to living my normal life while accepting that I still have some risk. I don’t think that forcing other people to get vaccinated further reduces the risk to me (which is already very low). At least, it doesn’t provide enough of a benefit to offset the costs of removing freedom. Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. If you want to remove the risk of dying, get the vaccine. If you want to take the risk, don’t. People are free to do other risky things like skydiving or free climbing. If you don’t want to accept the risks of those things you can opt out of doing them.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    > I don’t think that forcing other people to get vaccinated further reduces the risk to me (which is already very low). It objectively does... the hospital capacity risk, the risk of variants spreading among the unvaxed, or the breakthrough cases. > At least, it doesn’t provide enough of a benefit to offset the costs of removing freedom. That is an opinion not all agree with. > Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. What about "long covid"? That sounds also miserable.
    - TimTheTinker 5y ago
      What about people who have already survived Covid? Studies are pretty clear that they're somewhat more immune than folks who've had the shot.
ikr678 5y ago
Yes, broadly speaking. That is the principle of herd immunity. We managed to eradicate smallpox with mandatory vaccination programs without all this political fuss.
- imgabe 5y ago
  Smallpox was way, way worse than Covid. If Covid were killing and permanently disfiguring children en masse, you can be sure there would be no resistance to the vaccine.
adrianN 5y ago
Just because seatbelts are "truly protective" that doesn't mean that getting into accidents is risk free.
- imgabe 5y ago
  Just because driving a car isn’t risk free doesn’t mean you outlaw cars. You take the sensible precautions that are available and accept that a life worth living involves a certain amount of risk.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    We did outlaw driving without seatbelts. Against strong protests at the time.
    - imgabe 5y ago
      We don’t know what happened in the alternate universe where there were no seatbelt laws. Maybe there are people here who died because they stubbornly refused to ever wear a seatbelt because they had taken a public stance against seatbelts and made not wearing a seatbelt into a noble fight against tyranny. Maybe in the other universe they’re still alive because they were able to come around and change their mind without feeling like they lost a fight and were admitting defeat. But I guess we’ll never know, because if you think something is a good idea what you should do is immediately use the government to coerce everybody into doing it under threat of fines and punishment.
      - adrianN 5y ago
        Are you seriously arguing that without seatbelt laws more people would've been saved by seatbelts?
        imgabe 5y ago
        Have you never heard of the saying “you catch more flies with honey”? Is the law really the driving force behind why most people wear seatbelts? I don’t think so.

This ^. If the shots are truly protective, I don't understand what the hubbub is all about. Is it really all about protecting those who truly can't get the shot for whatever reason? I doubt it.

Ensorceled 5y ago

The shots are NOT truly protective. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has an effectiveness of about 91%. That means in about 9% of cases it is not protective. I'm amazed we are this deep into this pandemic and people still have black and white thinking wrt to vaccinces.

imgabe 5y ago
I think most people consider 91% to be “truly” protective. Nothing is 100%. The vaccine is more than effective enough to reduce the risk of Covid to the general background risk level of life in general (things like car accidents, slipping in the shower, eating red meat, contracting a flesh eating amoeba from swimming in a lake etc.)
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  Car crashes kill 30K people a year in the US. COVID has killed 400K in the US in 2021. It's literally 10x worse than cars and 30K from cars is horrific.
  - imgabe 5y ago
    How many vaccinated people have been killed by Covid? I’m talking about the risk after you’re vaccinated.
TimTheTinker 5y ago
91% is truly protective, as long as that effectiveness lasts long enough to be meaningful. In fact, 91% is an amazingly high number - I don't know if any pre-mRNA vaccine has ever reached that level of effectiveness. So I return to my original point -- if they're really that effective, why the hubbub?
- forgotmyoldname 5y ago
  Not to be condescending, but because people have been saying for a year now or more now that the virus will rapidly evolve and any vaccines will become less effective over time because of it. And the virus rapidly evolved and the vaccines we have became less effective to new strains, as expected. A quick deployment of vaccines would greatly reduce that risk (see: Japan currently having infections in the double digits following a rapid deployment in vaccines and universal masks, leaving little room for new strains to adapt). The pandemic has been a long chain of some insightful people saying "This bad thing will happen if people don't take X precaution." People say that's a lie--then don't take X precautions. Bad thing happens. People get angry and say they were lied to because bad thing happened when they were told it wouldn't happen (because loads of people took no precautions). Then there's a warning about another bad thing happening, followed by denial.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  It's quite clear that the person who wrote the comment I'm replying to believes that "truly protective" means 100% protection, and that if the vaccine was "truly protective" you no longer need to worry about getting COVID. This is a very dangerous idea and why there is so much confusion and misinformation. By insisting that 91% is "truly effective" in conversations like this you are not helping.

imgabe 5y ago

And if you can still transmit the disease even after getting the shot, then it doesn't protect those people anyway. They will still have to exercise whatever caution is necessary to protect themselves, which they would have to do anyway, because there are other diseases as well.

TimTheTinker 5y ago
Yeah, it's a partial measure that carries no guarantees... which makes it a poor candidate for a fix to roll out to everyone, in my opinion. It doesn't make sense to me why officials aren't focusing just on getting as close to 100% as possible of the vulnerable vaccinated. It's well known that surviving covid is a much better protection, and thus contributes more to herd immunity, than the mRNA shot+boosters. Perhaps "following the money" can provide answers? A vaccine mandate is a great way of making a lot of money for some people...
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > it's well known that surviving covid is a much better protection, Getting sick sucks though. Especially when people get "long covid" that doesn't ever go away. > Perhaps "following the money" can provide answers? Perhaps the answer is not a secret conspiracy but a rational, human desire to protect people.
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    > Getting sick sucks though. Yeah, but that's really up to me, isn't it? There's a reason I choose not to live in China, Laos, or Vietnam. Now that the vaccine is so widely available: (a) health officials should drop all orders and regulations, and (b) hospitals ought to say "look, here's our COVID capacity; if we're full we can't serve you, sorry" -- with that capacity set at a reasonable, sustainable number for them. ... unless the shot isn't what they say it is in terms of effectiveness or safety. But if it is really that effective and safe, I don't see any reason not to implement (a) and (b). > Perhaps the answer is not a secret conspiracy but a rational, human desire to protect people. That's not what I see when people's basic human rights and freedoms are being removed. People in Australia are being kept in freakin' internment camps. When a 91+% effectiveness shot is available for free to everyone, the bar of rationally protecting people has been more than cleared. This doesn't appear to be about that anymore.

jhanschoo 5y ago

If you catch the flu once your immune system remembers it and can easily deal with exposure much better, but this memory fades in time. Your immune system isn't perfect either, and there are breakthrough cases, and this is more frequent in the elderly, albeit frequently milder. The vaccine offers protection similar to catching the flu (albeit much better in the case of the mRNA and J&J ones (<10% infected compared to ~50% infected in traditional technology) but protection is not guaranteed. I'm disappointed I'm explaining this, I thought it's common knowledge that vaccines offer great protection but not invulnerability.

imgabe 5y ago
I know all that. I can fully accept that the vaccine doesn’t make me invulnerable. I have the vaccine and am fully prepared to go back to living my normal life while accepting that I still have some risk. I don’t think that forcing other people to get vaccinated further reduces the risk to me (which is already very low). At least, it doesn’t provide enough of a benefit to offset the costs of removing freedom. Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. If you want to remove the risk of dying, get the vaccine. If you want to take the risk, don’t. People are free to do other risky things like skydiving or free climbing. If you don’t want to accept the risks of those things you can opt out of doing them.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > I don’t think that forcing other people to get vaccinated further reduces the risk to me (which is already very low). It objectively does... the hospital capacity risk, the risk of variants spreading among the unvaxed, or the breakthrough cases. > At least, it doesn’t provide enough of a benefit to offset the costs of removing freedom. That is an opinion not all agree with. > Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. What about "long covid"? That sounds also miserable.
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    What about people who have already survived Covid? Studies are pretty clear that they're somewhat more immune than folks who've had the shot.

ikr678 5y ago

Yes, broadly speaking. That is the principle of herd immunity. We managed to eradicate smallpox with mandatory vaccination programs without all this political fuss.

imgabe 5y ago
Smallpox was way, way worse than Covid. If Covid were killing and permanently disfiguring children en masse, you can be sure there would be no resistance to the vaccine.

adrianN 5y ago

Just because seatbelts are "truly protective" that doesn't mean that getting into accidents is risk free.

imgabe 5y ago
Just because driving a car isn’t risk free doesn’t mean you outlaw cars. You take the sensible precautions that are available and accept that a life worth living involves a certain amount of risk.
- adrianN 5y ago
  We did outlaw driving without seatbelts. Against strong protests at the time.
  - imgabe 5y ago
    We don’t know what happened in the alternate universe where there were no seatbelt laws. Maybe there are people here who died because they stubbornly refused to ever wear a seatbelt because they had taken a public stance against seatbelts and made not wearing a seatbelt into a noble fight against tyranny. Maybe in the other universe they’re still alive because they were able to come around and change their mind without feeling like they lost a fight and were admitting defeat. But I guess we’ll never know, because if you think something is a good idea what you should do is immediately use the government to coerce everybody into doing it under threat of fines and punishment.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Are you seriously arguing that without seatbelt laws more people would've been saved by seatbelts?
      - imgabe 5y ago
        Have you never heard of the saying “you catch more flies with honey”? Is the law really the driving force behind why most people wear seatbelts? I don’t think so.